


Nurseybitty Headcanon #200

by drea_rev



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Domestic, Fluff, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, au as parents, parenting, rarepair, zodiac is an awesome kid's name
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-08 23:30:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,845
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11092173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drea_rev/pseuds/drea_rev
Summary: Just a ficlet from my nurseybitty tumblr @https://nurseyxbitty.tumblr.com follow for more!





	Nurseybitty Headcanon #200

###  [nurseybitty headcanon #200](https://nurseyxbitty.tumblr.com/post/157962925300/nurseybitty-headcanon-200-part-one)

“Zodiac, get up, you’ll be late!”

Zodiac dragged his blanket down from over his eyes and squinted at Pops. But the blond Southern man had already disappeared from the door.

He stood up, and immediately tripped over a toy WWE wrestling ring set up with Shopkins as the wrestlers.

-

Holding Dad’s hand as he was led into the schoolyard, Zodiac frowned, not because he was upset, but because facial expressions are different on everyone and don’t necessarily always offer a glimpse from the outside into the self. Sarah Cunningham, Dakota and Fletcher’s mom, squatted down to make their faces level and gave him a wide toothy grin, but her eye shape didn’t change. He stepped protectively behind Dad.

“Grumpy today, isn’t he?” Sarah said, before exploding into forced laughter.

Zodiac wasn’t, but he didn’t say that, he just looked nervously up at Dad, who met his eyes with understanding. 

Then Derek turned to Sarah and smiled, but a smaller smile. Zodiac didn’t like this business of fake-smiling.

-

“Zodiac! Come on!”

Moses Jones was tapping the top of the jungle gym, where he sat comfortably, waiting for his friend to join him. Zodiac was quiet and steady as he moved his hands and feet, crawling up more than pulling himself up, like Moses had. He had seen his Dad do it this way at the bouldering gym. “Come on!” Moses was so excited to sit at the top of the playground with his friend. He reached out for Zodiac with both arms, and Zodiac, after a moment’s hesitation, took them. Moses tugged him gently to the top, and put an arm around him as Zodiac turned back.

It felt like they were at the top of the school: they could see the roof of the slide, the tops of the kids’ heads as they played on the swings, and they could see over the play structure to the doors where they’d been let out for recess.

“I’m…I’m Spiderman,” said Zodiac.

“I’m…” Moses said slowly, “I’m…”

They felt vibration through the metal supports of the jungle gym, and saw Kayla, in pink striped leggings and a skirt, pulling herself up with her long, strong limbs.

“Hi, Zodiac. Hi, Moses,” she said.

“He’s Spiderman,” Moses said.

“I mean hi Spiderman.”

“Hi,” Zodiac said. He reached down to pull her, like Moses had for him, and she grabbed onto his hand while pulling herself up with her other arm. She tiptoed on the reinforced, rubber-covered chains around them, looking at the entire playground.

“I’m a whale,” Moses finally said. “I’m gonna learn to swim, Zodiac. I’m…I’m gonna be in…a class.”

“You’re a whale.”

“Whales are sick.”

“I’m gonna jump from up here,” Kayla said, pointing to a structure a few feet away.

She jumped and fell on her knee, scratching it.

“Ow,” she said.

“Kayla, you hurt,” Zodiac said, turning. “It’s ‘cause you don’t have web-slinging. You need to be Spiderman.”

A teacher ran up to Kayla. “Hey, K! That wasn’t safe!”

“It’s ‘cause I wasn’t Spiderman,” Kayla said, and the teacher made a snorting noise behind her hand as she led her away to the nurse.

-

“Pops? Dad?”

Derek and Eric, seated across from each other, each looked to the side at their son, holding his fork and knife but looking at an untouched plate of potatoes and scrambled eggs, his favorite dish.

“Honey? Eric said.

“Kiddo?” Derek said.

“M-M-Mrs C-Cunningham said,” Zodiac wasn’t sure why his voice sounded so weird suddenly, “She said I have…an interesting name. S-She asked if…I like Chinese food.”

It somehow hurt even more when Dad put his face into his palm, in Zodiac’s peripheral vision. That’s when he really started to sniffle.

“S-she said my n-name means…means…twelve…animals…in…like…chinese food, she said she’s a rooster, I d-d-don’t know what she was talking about…”

Zodiac was picked up and cradled, his back rubbed gently, by Eric, as Derek patted his head, the two men standing and comforting him.

“W-What does th-that mean?”

 

* * *

 

 

Moses wasn’t kidding about being a whale (even though he was also a kid). His parents, Monique and Lesean, had their hands full with him and his 5 brothers and sisters, but after he demonstrated his fin-ishing touch in several kids’ swim classes, they had him enrolled in an official PADI youth program called Bubblemaker. He got to use actual SCUBA equipment to breathe underwater. Zodiac had missed the class deadline, or he’d have done it too.

With six types of extracurricular activities to juggle after school, the Joneses made it their custom to eat takeout two nights a week. That was how Zodiac looked up from his egg foo young and stared at the crumped paper bag, the menu stapled to it, and his own name.

“Huh?”

Zodiac put his food down, crawled across the floor (the way Spiderman does on walls, being that he was wearing the outfit and everything) and picked up the empty bag. 

He unraveled the paper to see it, and he felt chilly suddenly. Twelve animals. He found it after a quick scan of the paper.

The rooster.

-

“Mrs Jones? What–oh no! I’ll come over right away–actually, yes, I can talk to him, if–”

“POPS!” Zodiac cried, sobbing into the phone. Monique had given him her IPhone to talk to father 1 on. “Th-th-the ROOSTER!”

“Zodiac, honey, what’s the–”

“DON’T CALL ME THAT!” The boy’s voice shook heartbreakingly. “I HATE YOU!”

Derek had just walked in as Eric met his eyes in shock. He mouthed ‘What’

“Honey, Dad’s going to come pick you up, and we can talk about–”

“I HATE YOU!”

-

Moses was holding Spiderman around the shoulders on the Joneses’ front stoop as Derek drove up and got out of the car.

“He was upset by something on the Chinese food bag,” Lesean said, sadly.

“Can I see it?” Derek said, and no sooner did Charley, Moses’s brother, shove it into his hands.

“Oh, I get it,” Derek said icily. He squatted down and enveloped his son in a hug. “Did you eat well?”

“I t-told P-Pops I h-hate him,” Zodiac said, his voice tiny and hoarse from sobbing. “H-He prob-b-bly hates me.”

“No he doesn’t. He loves you. And I love you. And your friends love you. You’re so loved and important. We’ll talk about this when we get home, okay? Want to go now?”

 

The next day was a Saturday, and Eric and Derek were staring down at the paper from the Chinese food takeout when Zodiac came down the stairs after a long, restful sleep.

“I love you, honey, I’m not mad!” Pops said, getting out of his chair and squatting down to Zodiac’s level. “But I want you to tell me how you felt about this paper, okay?”

Zodiac felt cold as he looked at the expanse of printed paper. Red ink. Animals drawn with their names printed in multiple languages. Years. “Is…my name…like…a word? Did…you name me thinking…I was going to like Chinese food?”

“I…think names are words,” Derek said slowly. “Not just yours. All of them. Eric and Derek are words.”

“But Eric and Derek aren’t also, like, a thing.”

Eric said softly, “Do you want to know why we named you that?”

There was a pause. Zodiac said slowly, “Yes.”

“I like the name Zack,” Derek said. “Like, the sound of it. The letter Z. But…’Zachary’ sounds weird. Like…I couldn’t imagine saying it over and over.”

“Zachary,” Zodiac said suddenly. Then he said it again. “Zachary, Zachary, Zachary, Zachary…” 

It started to feel like he was just saying the words Zack and Carry over and over, and he said so.

“I thought that, too. And…well, Zo, like that sound, like ‘Joe’ would be a cool nickname…but I wanted that K sound…I..,spent a lot of time trying to, like, mad scientist the right name for you, just because I had this idea in my head of how I wanted it to sound.”

“It…had nothing to do with Chinese food?” Zodiac said.

“No,” Eric piped in. “Do you know what the word Zodiac means, apart from that? It’s…a group of sets of stars spread all across the sky.”

“What, Pops?”

“It’s true, honey. There’s astrology, it’s a belief that when the sun passes through different stars they change the fortune of people who were born when it was happening. The Chinese zodiac features animals, but they don’t relate to stars. They relate to the orbit of Jupiter.”

“Jupiter?” Zodiac said. “The planet?”

“Yes,” Derek said. “It’s just a different way to look at it, in years. It takes almost twelve years for Jupiter to orbit. It’s a big planet.”

“Wow.”

Eric suddenly looked nonplussed. “Jupiter is named after a person,” he said softly, as if just discovering it. “Well, a character, anyway, in Greek pantheon. He was a god, Jupiter.”

“Wait, they named a thing after a person?”

“A lot of things are named after people. A lot of astronomers get stuff named after them when they discover new moons and other stuff in the sky we didn’t know about it before.”

“Oh,” said Zodiac. “So…things can be named after people.”

“About that,” Eric said, and here he gave Zodiac a book: Webster’s Dictionary. “Can you look up ‘Fletcher’ for me?”

“That’s Fletcher Cunningham. He’s not in the dictionary. 

Pops said, with a smile, “Check.”

“‘A maker of arrows,’“ Zodiac read aloud. “Huh?”

“’Dakota’?”

“It says here it’s a language…and a native American tribe,” Zodiac blinked. “Wait. It’s also two states…”

He slammed the book on the table. “AND A ‘CUNNINGHAM’ IS–IS A SMART PIECE OF MEAT!”

Zodiac stood up, and backed away from the table.

“Honey, if you don’t like your name, since it wasn’t your choice, All you have to do is let us know and we can help you change it. You can choose a new name for yourself if you want. You don’t need to have one you don’t like.”

Zodiac shook his head, his eyes shining, as it all suddenly made sense to him. He walked up the staircase backwards, holding onto the banister. But each step he took, he repeated his own name.

“Zodiac. Zodiac, Zodiac. Zodiac. Zodiac…”

He walked backwards into his room, and his feet skipped ninja-like over the WWE wrestling ring (this time featuring Calico Critters). Each step was his name. He dropped back into bed and pulled the covers over his face. In the pale, soft, comfortable space of the linen that the light from the window shone through just enough to show it was a weekend morning, he was not alone. No. He had his name. And he said it 143 more times, interspersed with a yawn or two, before he drifted off to sleep.

It didn’t sound like a word for a thing. It sounded exactly like a name, because it was. A word stops being a thing when it starts to be a name.

 

 


End file.
